Great points. Now that there fabless & have a design that will allow them to get the cpu's done anywhere I think they will ramp down to lower nm's quicker and as you sugest be more "leaps" then "baby steps" as intel seems to have for ages now.

Furthermore though, that "ace up intel's sleeve" could be a hinder if programing keeps going on a "core" basis .... unless haswell has some hidden true core's/streams up there sleeve ...

I think Intel could bump up the amount of cores they have though pretty much whenever they want, the thing is that AMD has kind of filled that market niche and people using apps that take up a lot of threads or a lot of small applications that take up a single thread are with AMD now at that lower price point. I think because of that intel will stick to less cores with more performance per core until they have to bump it up. As of now intel isn't in a rush to do anything they don't have to do so if they can beat 8 core AMD processors with 6c/12t or even 4c/8t like they do in most apps now they will continue to go that route.